News

St Kilda staff member Gerard Elson was named Young Bookseller of the Year at the 2015 ABA Conference last night. We’re enormously proud.
Here, he tells us his favourite books to handsell and why publishers must continue to be ‘daring’.
What are your favourite books to handsell to customers?

Two books I always enjoy sending to good homes are Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Sarah Bakewell’s gen…

Summer, St Kilda. Strolling Acland Street, you dispose of your empty frozen yoghurt cup and peel off into Readings Books. The store’s cool interior is a welcome respite from the cramming heat outside: perfect conditions for browsing. You clock the new releases, turn the latest Murakami over in your hands. It’s a lovely object, though not what you’re after today. You saunter around a bi…

Last week saw the release of Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, and over the weekend the Guardian published a piece by Hari Kunzru asking is the author brave or shameless? Here, bookseller Gerard Elson responds.

I can’t think of a less appropriate descriptor for Knausgaard than ‘shameless’. He’s the converse of that, its blue, black and white photo ne…

When it screened at last year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival, Bertrand Bonello’s lavish, lugubrious fin de siècle bore the superior title House of Tolerance. The term was a euphemism for a brothel around the turn of the twentieth century and, given the tenor and milieu of Bonello’s film (which is set in the languid world of high-end prostitution), this was perhaps a far more befitting …

Scripted by geek doyen Joss Whedon, this is a gleeful subversion of every hackneyed trope in the horror movie handbook, made electric by its creator’s knack for pithy, pop-culture-savvy dialogue and wicked character-based gags. By its apocalyptic end, this ultimately offers no less t…